


Honor System

by Querulousgawks



Category: Veronica Mars (TV), Veronica Mars - All Media Types
Genre: College, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Future Fic, Growing Up, Male-Female Friendship, Movie Spoilers, Season/Series 03 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-24
Updated: 2014-09-24
Packaged: 2018-02-17 19:42:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2321078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Querulousgawks/pseuds/Querulousgawks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wallace goes back to Max for a study guide, and encounters Mac instead. Enter redirection, reminiscences, slow burn, etc:</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Mac snorted and said, "Madison was -" <br/>"-no, wait, I can get this. Closeted cheerleader?"<br/>"No."<br/>"The one all fixated on being just like Meg?"<br/>"No."<br/>"The one that always glared at Duncan and Veronica?"<br/>"That was <em>Logan, </em>Wallace." </p>
            </blockquote>





	Honor System

**Author's Note:**

> I posted a much shorter version of this a couple of weeks ago, and realized I had a lot more of the story to tell. Thanks to Jaqofspades for asking for more, and betaing the results!

_Spring 2007_

The last person Wallace expected to open the door (The Door, he’d already dubbed it, to his future as an engineer and a cheat) was Cindy Mackenzie.  But there she was, in an old t-shirt and tiny cotton shorts, blinking at him like she’d just woken up. He stared back. Mac with this guy? The test seller? She looked…sort of terrible, actually, bleary and pale, but when she smiled at him, he realized that it was the first time since graduation that he’d seen her without any shadows under her eyes.

The thought made him smile back, until her gaze sharpened and he knew she’d figured out why he was here. Excuses ran through his mind as he opened his mouth, but she cut him off. “Nope. Not again. Max isn’t at home to you.” She leaned back for a moment, not even bothering to be furtive, and shook her head at someone beyond the frame.  
  
Irritation was welcome, warming the cold knot of shame in his stomach. He said dully, “I’ve got my own conscience, Mac.”  
  
She gave him a quick grin. “You use most of that one just for Veronica," she said. "I can pick up the slack.” Her face fell as he just stared at her, and she added seriously, “You don’t need him. I promise.”  
  
“But what, you do?” She flinched and he scowled, unwilling to back down. What did she know about it? She wasn’t staring at the numbers eight hours a day, watching them make less sense with every glance. She hadn’t given up the one thing she was actually good at to chase her oldest dream, only to find out she couldn’t keep up.  
  
“Go see Mr Wu,” she snapped, and shut the door before he could say another word.   
  
He wasn’t going to do it. Mac wasn’t some expert – well, not an honor and integrity expert, anyway. She was the last person to get righteous about breaking the rules.  He argued with her in his head all day: came up with snappy exit lines as he packed up his textbooks, reminded her of her own deceits as he drove his battered car into town. Until he was out of arguments and back in Neptune High, smelling chalk and Pine-Sol in this classroom that already felt too small. Wasn’t that only supposed to happen when you came back to a place years later? Mr. Wu was the same, though, tidy and deadpan, listening without visible sympathy to the tale of Wallace Fennel, Freshman Failure.  
  
A little silence fell, after. He had hesitantly recounted his semester, the lectures he couldn’t follow, the quizzes he handed in with confidence and took back with every problem marked wrong. It didn’t feel like the whole story, somehow. He’d just run out of things to say.  
  
Water bubbled in the window air conditioning unit - Wu kept it arctic in the lab. Wallace took a breath, finally, and pushed it out with the confession he’d been holding in around his mom, his friends, even Darrell. “I think I’m just not smart enough to handle it.”  
  
“Wrong.” Mr Wu rapped out the single syllable like a ruler across the desk. It was the same sharp dismissal he’d used on slackers in the back row, when he caught them bullshitting answers to a question they hadn’t heard. Despite having been one of those slackers, a year ago, more into planes and engines than the equations that controlled them, Wallace found the tone comforting.  He realized he believed it, even before Wu continued, methodically laying out the variables: “You’re failing for two reasons. You’re not focused, which is preventable; and you know too much, which you can’t fix but will help you in the long run.”  
  
The lack of focus was basketball, a choice that itched at him, still. But – “I know too much?” He asked, and winced when Wu folded his arms over his sweatervest.  “Not that this wasn’t a good physics class,” he added hastily. “But it doesn’t feel like I know any of this sh-stuff.”  
  
“You’re in fluid dynamics, right? Have you done Reynold’s number yet?” Wallace nodded glumly, remembering another formula that had slipped away from him in the exam room. “What is it?”  
  
That wasn’t his gotcha voice – Wu sounded genuinely curious, even though Wallace was sure he knew. “It’s…a way to relate all the factors that affect drag on a plane- or anything moving through a fluid, I guess. Speed, air density. Uh, geometry of the wing. All that. So if you put a plane in a wind tunnel – have you seen the Hearst wind tunnel?” he couldn’t help the sudden reverence in his voice, that place, and he would have been embarrassed but Wu actually nodded, looking a little wistful himself. Wallace jerked himself back to his explanation, “so, if you want to see how a plane performs, you can test it under a whole bunch of different conditions, just by changing the R number.”  
  
Wu leaned against the desk, looking obscurely satisfied. “I asked my last engineering major that question, and you know what he said?” His expression was way too smug, and Wallace wondered, stomach dropping, if he had just missed something painfully obvious. He shook his head. “He recited the formula at me. Word perfect, but not worth much if you’re trying to calibrate a wind tunnel. That’s fine for people who don’t care. He’ll go to sleep on his fundamentals exam, hand his diploma to a hedge fund and never think about dynamics again.  But you – this stuff is tripping you up, in part, because you’re already connecting it to practice. You’re thinking too much.” He spread his hands, pleased as the time he’d pulled off a tricky inertia demonstration against the jeering skepticism of the back row. Wallace felt the same as he had then, the familiar grit of irritation against a sweep of admiration and excitement. But…  
  
“How do I fix that, exactly? A lobotomy?”  
  
Wu rolled his eyes. “See? Too ambitious. Just get back to basics. Don’t let thinking out every variable stop you from memorizing a formula. Do the early practice problems in the books, the ones you skipped because they were just numbers and didn’t have any applications.” Wallace winced. “You’ll connect the dots better once you’ve got all this in your head.”  
  
 “No magic bullet, huh?”  
  
“Oh, I’m sure there is one. Probably costs a hundred dollars a test over at Hearst, now. But I don’t recommend it.”  _That_ was Wu’s gotcha voice. He shook his head at the guilty startle it elicited, and said, “why don’t you bring in your next problem set, instead. I could use the practice.”  
  
Wallace swallowed hard, relief and hope welling up in him. Wu gave him one of his rare smiles.  
  
“There’s no crying in the physics lab, Mr. Fennel.”

 

_Winter 2008_

He was working late in the best engineering lab - one of the few above ground, and just two doors down from the wind tunnel - when Mac stuck her head through the door. 

"Don't laugh," she warned, and eased it open until she was fully visible in the doorway. In - a suit? And was she taller? He looked down just as she lifted a foot and wobbled her ankle, scowling. High heels. Right, she'd had that scholarship presentation at Neptune today. 

"Wow," he offered lamely. She winced. "No, you look good," he said, trying to recover. She looked like a lawyer, really, grown-up and distant, and he swallowed against his daily dose of missing Veronica. "You know, uh, tidy."

"Great," she sighed, slumping against the bench. "I'm sure the parents of Madison Sinclair, and the rest of the school board, were impressed by tidy."

"Which one was Madison?" Wallace asked, aiming for casual. He applied pressure to the wing where it met the fuselage, and kept his eyes on the glue beading out. He would need to wipe the edge before it dried. "Is that the girl who looked a little different every year?"

"That was Shelley Pomeroy." Mac reached behind him, holding her blazer away from the tabletop as she snagged a damp rag from the counter's edge. "Wait any longer and you'll have to sand those off."

Wallace tilted the model toward her, saying,"Thanks. Was her father a plastic surgeon, or what?"

Mac snorted and said, "That was Hannah...Griffin? I'm pretty sure Shelley's thing was just aggressive makeup. Madison was -" 

"-no, wait, I can get this. Closeted cheerleader?"

"No."

"The one all fixated on being just like Meg?"

"No."

"The one that always glared at Duncan and Veronica?"

"That was  _Logan,_ Wallace _."_

They grinned at each other. Wallace persisted, "The other one, the news girl."

_"_ No!"

"Hey, they kind of blended together, you know? Cookie cutter." He batted his lashes at her, and added the kicker, "Not like the people  _I_  got to know."

She narrowed her eyes at him over the balsa wood. "You remember exactly who she is."

He smirked a little, acquiescing, and said, "Veronica's high school nemesis? Hard to avoid it."

"Again,  _Logan_ was Veronica's high school nemesis. Madison belongs to me."

"If that's how you're defining nemesis..." he arched his brows, "...I'd be pretty okay with that." Mac kicked him under the table, but kept the opposite wing steady as she cleaned it. She was blushing, which he was pretty sure he'd never seen before, but she was smiling, too. Relaxed again. He added tentatively, "I just don't get why. I mean, all those interchangeable teen-movie nightmares, and she's the one that gets under your skin?"

Mac folded the rag in neat quarters, her smile rueful now, "Veronica can really keep a secret, huh? Madison and I were switched at birth. Bond figured it out, junior year."  

Wallace blinked at her. "That's -  _what?_ " 

"I guess I thought she told you."

Wallace stored the major wrongness ( _How does that even happen? Neptune, is how,_ ) away to focus on the minor one. "Are you kidding? Confidentiality was  _sacred._ Unless-"

"-she needed something," Mac finished, and added softly, "miss her?"

He just nodded, and they sat quietly for a while, the model balanced lightly between them. Wallace tried to think of something to share back, something that big, but all his Neptune stories ( _actually my dad was switched at birth too! at...my birth,_ ) felt too glib and too personal, at the same time. He took a breath, said, "can I tell you something weird?"

Mac leaned forward instantly, then pulled back, affecting exaggerated unconcern, "I mean, if you have to," she said. He laughed. 

"My mom loves Veronica, even after all the," he waved his free hand, trying to indicate  _bugged plants, stolen files, shock collar,_ "drama, you know?" Mac nodded and he continued, "but when she left, Mom said she thought it was a good thing, that I wasn't going to be my own person while V was still around."

"Sidekicks," Mac said wryly, gesturing between them.

"Yeah. I guess I wondered about it, too. But now she's gone and it's actually - I'm just the same. I get things right, or I screw up and fix it, or don't, mostly."

" _Wallace._ Are you saying you don't need a private detective?" Mac screwed up her mouth in exaggerated horror.

He shrugged, feeling oddly disloyal. "Seems like it," he said, then winced as she kicked him again, a lighter tap this time. 

"It doesn't mean you don't need  _her_ ," she said gently.

He smiled at her, shaking off his melancholy, and she gave him a suspicious look in return. "Damn straight," he said for emphasis.

"Hold on," she said, lifting her hands cautiously from the wing to snag a sheet of the heavy paper they used to make first-draft models. She cut a piece the size of a business card with an Exacto knife, then wrote carefully on both sides, shielding the words from him.   

She slid it across and he took it from her, baffled.  _Wallace Fennel,_ read one side in her plain clear print. He flipped it over and snorted out a laugh, shaking his head.  _Protagonist._  

 

  _Spring 2010_

He dodged the eye of the camera, but Mac followed his every twist, narrating solemnly for Veronica, “the finest of the recent graduates, Wallace Fennel possesses a BS M.E.  _and_ an Engineer-in-Training Certificate, all his own.” 

He gave up on hiding and held the diploma out for the camera, saying, “ _all_  my own!” The last round of exams had left him a little punchy, maybe. But the words brought back a memory and he batted the camera away to meet Mac’s eyes, feeling a rush of nostalgia and gratitude, “And you’re half the reason why. You know that, right?”

She flushed, surprising him. “I am, at most," she scrunched her face in mock calculation, "two percent of the reason why,” then grinned and added, “which, taking your future salary into account, is worth one organic wheat beer a week.”

He groaned. “Those are disgusting. It’s a date.”

 

_Spring 2012_

Wallace had gotten the text 20 minutes earlier, in time to stick a couple of her fancy beers left behind from last time in the freezer, and be able to greet her at the door with one.

“You break up?” He asked, adding hastily as she collapsed on the couch, “don’t waste the good stuff on the furniture, now.”

Mac sighed and kept the bottle vertical, even as she smushed her face into the cushions.  “Mutual agreement, blah blah blah,” she confirmed. Her voice echoed oddly from within the frame, “can I tell you something weird?”

Wallace sighed. “If you have to. Sitting up, though? It’s gotta be gross down there.” 

She wormed her way upright and drank deeply. “I mean nobody  _really_ compares, but…I think half the reason I went out with Sarah is that she reminded me of Veronica.”

Ever since someone at the firm had noticed his knack for explanations, Wallace had been doing high school science fairs and youth recruitment projects almost once a week. He’d gotten a lot of practice keeping his face blank and his voice encouraging no matter what came out of kids’ mouths, and he needed every ounce of it now. “…and?”

She let out something between a snort and a sniffle. “And I’m not cut out to date Veronicas.”

That was too much for his poker face; he burst out laughing, amusement mixed with relief he didn’t examine too closely, “You and me both, girl.”

Mac curled her feet up onto the couch and shoved them at his hip, saying, “Hey! You’re too  _good_ to date Veronicas. Literally.”

“And what are you, Purity Test? Too bad?” he teased, and used her moment of indignation to steal a swig of beer. Still disgusting.

“Something like that,” she said, smiling at him, and stood up. “Don’t strain yourself, Fennel, I’ll get your boring IPA.”

 

_Winter 2016_  

Wallace watched wet, outraged 09ers stream from the doors of the Neptune Grand, fighting off a grin and a headache with an equal lack of success.  _  
_

"And then the Hellmouth opened," Mac quipped from beside him, sounding tired. He gave up and laughed. She looked up at him, and he thought her smile turned oddly shy. “Can I tell you something weird?" she asked.

Wallace had just seen Eli Navarro and Logan Echolls crush a crowd of douchebags so he could get to the projector and turn off Veronica's sex tape. Nothing could be weirder, or more familiar, than that. But the response was ritual, now, so he said, “if you have to," as he wrapped an arm around her shoulders. 

They were both soaked, and Mac was beginning to shiver."Find an exit, my ass, _"_ she'd muttered, parking herself outside the projection room door with her purse-sized can of mace; the memory made him grin until she snuggled in against him. _Just Mac,_ he reminded himself, but his body wasn’t listening. Wallace kept his eyes above her shoulders and tried to remember where he'd left his jacket.

Mac seemed to be having trouble, too; she flicked her glance up to his, then away, a couple of times before mumbling, “I’mgladAlexisisn’tsingleanymore.”He stumbled, and her arm slid around his back, intending to steady him. Not helping. 

“You asked?” His voice cracked, and Mac nodded very slightly. “Wait- when did you even see her?” Mac seemed to find the line of cars more interesting than the conversation, and it clicked. “You looked her up,” he accused. Another nod. She still wasn’t looking at him, and he pulled her closer, suddenly confident. Suddenly giddy as hell. “Can I tell  _you_  something weird?”

He just knew she was rolling her eyes, and he was missing it, so he tucked his free hand against her jaw, turned her gently to face him. She went still for a moment before lightly returning his line: “if you have to.”

“I forgot to ask her about it,” he said softly, and she kissed him.

Whoa. Definitely not  _just Mac;_ he had a fleeting worry that it might never be  _just Mac_ again. But it was… _still_  Mac, he thought, with the same distant part of his brain not occupied with the determined inquiry of her mouth, or her hand tightening at his waist. There was a slow warm comfort under the rapid heat of the kiss.

She pulled away too soon, her voice thick with reluctance as she murmured, “We’re supposed to...afterparty?"

“It’s," she paused to kiss him again, and he wondered dimly how long you had to stay at an afterparty, "a date.”

 

_Spring 2016_  
  
Wallace ruffled the last few pages at the bottom of the last box, then pulled out the stack. Almost done. The first page read Study Guide across the top, and he frowned at it for a minute, trying to think of an engineering professor soft enough to offer study guides, before he remembered. None of them had.  
  
It had been a long time, but he could still make sense of the questions, trace the path to the answer embedded in each problem. Wu had grilled him, that year, until he could have recited every formula if you had shaken him awake and demanded them at two in the morning-and Wu had been right, the rest had fallen into place. It had been like learning to drive stick, or, even further back, like learning to dribble: impossible, impossible, impossible, done. Muscle memory kicked in, and something you’d never imagined understanding was suddenly a part of you.  
  
Mac padded though the doorway, saying, "Listen, Fennel. This room is actually going to need some floor space for us to snag Veronica as a roommate."

"She's crashing with  _Dick Casablancas_ now that Logan's deployed, you think she'll be picky about her alternatives?" He answered absently, still lost in the study guide.

"Unless she likes to sleep on graph paper- you ok? What's that?"

He looked up finally, smiled at the sight of her, barefoot in his old Hearst t-shirt and her still-older cotton shorts. “Firestarter,” he said, and tossed the test into the shred pile. He didn't need shortcuts, anymore.


End file.
